Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Being Slow to Criticise

solipsys.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 103 posts

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#51

Post by grey-area »

taffer wrote: post #49
grey-area wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it lasts long enough, a temporary natural disaster becomes an economic disaster. I think the rough market consensus at the moment is as you state it - this is a natural disaster which will be over soon. That is a possible outcome at this point, but a second wave in the US for example would have significant impacts and cause entire industries to fall into bankruptcy - wiping out shareholders and leading to signific…

I haven't read the book, but do you know where the expected returns (the straight line you mention) come from?

This lecture contains a similar graph on asset prices - he uses returns from the S&P for the period 1871-2013. The book really is worth a read too, it's more accessible than the lecture or slides might indicate.

https://www.gurufocus.com/news/336523/speculative-asset-pric...

https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/shiller-lecture-s...

The comparison is between the actual stock prices against the constant discount rate of subsequent real dividends.

Day to day prices are unforecastable, and it's not really understood what drives pricing in the market.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#52

Post by grey-area »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #37
grey-area wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it lasts long enough, a temporary natural disaster becomes an economic disaster. I think the rough market consensus at the moment is as you state it - this is a natural disaster which will be over soon. That is a possible outcome at this point, but a second wave in the US for example would have significant impacts and cause entire industries to fall into bankruptcy - wiping out shareholders and leading to signific…

How do you determine whether it was panic or just uncertainty? It could be a rational reason for markets to swing wildly because of uncertainty about future. It might take time to gather enough data to assess the risks properly, and while risks are as unknown it is rational that market will be valued lower. Each bit of knowledge makes uncertain a little bit less uncertain.

I don't think we know enough to decide why markets swing wildly around the actual return, but that they do is demonstrable fact.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#53

Post by dgellow »

anclp wrote: post #35
chrismsimpson wrote: post #4

Being slow to criticise, particularly with colleagues you have to work day in and day out with, is critically important. That said, much of the FOSS currently available is either itself crap, or built on libraries and/or toolkits that are crap. I cite specifically anything of the GTK flavour, many popular things built in C/C++, and to a lesser degree QT. Why is this? Writing capstone technology (compilers and languag…

FOSS seems to be adopted by most Internet companies, where Swift, C# and .NET are fringe languages. clang and gcc produce faster code than Visual Studio and are more pleasant to use. IBM is now using clang in its terrible xlc compiler. Mathematica uses gmp (in ( gasp ) C!), there's no commercial alternative to gmp or mpfr. If you are writing apps for iOS or Windows, sure, the cited languages are better. That is quite…

C# is a fringe language? What are you talking about?

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#54

Post by taffer »

grey-area wrote: post #50
taffer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does 'irrational in important ways' even mean? What Shiller has shown is simply that the idea of a perfectly effecient market is self-contradictory. Efficiency is just a very good approximation in practice.

I believe he shows in that book it's not a very good approximation - the market oscillates from overshooting to undershooting actual returns, and I don't think he believes market movements are always based on rational decisions, hence the title of the book.

> I believe he shows in that book it's not a very good approximation

But what does that mean? What is a good predictor of future returns and what is not? If markets are not, what is?

> the market wildly overshoots and undershoots actual returns

Well, the actual returns are only known retrospectively, but the current prices have to reflect all future returns. So, of course, current prices will always be wrong, that's not surprising at all.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#55

Post by taffer »

grey-area wrote: post #51
taffer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read the book, but do you know where the expected returns (the straight line you mention) come from?

This lecture contains a similar graph on asset prices - he uses returns from the S&P for the period 1871-2013. The book really is worth a read too, it's more accessible than the lecture or slides might indicate. https://www.gurufocus.com/news/336523/speculative-asset-pric... https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/shiller-lecture-s... The comparison is between the actual stock prices against the constant discount…

> The comparison is between the actual stock prices against the constant discount rate of subsequent real dividends.

The EMH states that the market incorporates all currently available information, but future dividends are known only in hindsight. Prices that fluctuate around future earnings therefore are not in conflict with efficient markets at all.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#56

Post by mannykannot »

lmm wrote: post #39
Daub wrote: post #15

Holding back on criticism is one of the founding principles of the brainstorming technique... that and listening.

And research has shown that it's counterproductive. Culling bad ideas quickly makes for better results.

That may be, for genuinely bad ideas, but that is not really the issue here, which is the summary dismissal of something without due consideration, and, more generally, the predisposition to act that way.

I have seen good things dismissed because the critic has some arbitrary standards of style, or is disinclined to make an effort to understand the implementation, or has failed to learn enough about the problem domain to understand all the complications, or wants to rewrite from scratch because "I'm a software engineer, not a maintainer", or "not invented here", or to lower expectations, or to intimidate and dominate... To be fair, at some time or other I have been guilty of most of these things.

I suspect that college sometimes gives people the mistaken impression that analysis and critical thinking (and being smart) is all about picking apart someone else's thoughts, but it takes more than that to create something worthwhile.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#57

Post by eeZah7Ux »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

There's another factor at play in these discussions: Cynicism tends to look smart to outside observers. Cynicism is often mistaken for competence to outside observers. If a piece of software has a specific problem, the person chanting "This software is garbage" is going to look smarter than the people saying "Hold on, maybe this software is this way for a reason". There are various (somewhat weak) studies on the topi…

You are confusing cynicism with expressing criticism. They are 100% orthogonal.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#58

Post by ken »

> Additionally, there might be time pressures, political pressures, engineering constraints, access problems, and more.

All of those (except possibly "engineering constraints") are merely excuses for why it ended up being garbage, not reasons why it's not garbage.

This conversation goes both ways. When someone calls my work garbage, I can sit there and try to come up with excuses, or I can say "yes it is!" and we can move on towards a solution. Just because someone takes a swing doesn't mean you need to fight them.

Curiously, I only see the author's response in software. In every other field I've worked in, an experienced person is free to call something garbage (or worse), and the recipient of this criticism is expected to not waste everyone's time by making excuses. You'd think the internet would give us a thicker skin, not a thinner one.

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#59

Post by ken »

chrismsimpson wrote: post #4

Being slow to criticise, particularly with colleagues you have to work day in and day out with, is critically important. That said, much of the FOSS currently available is either itself crap, or built on libraries and/or toolkits that are crap. I cite specifically anything of the GTK flavour, many popular things built in C/C++, and to a lesser degree QT. Why is this? Writing capstone technology (compilers and languag…

> the power and elegance offered by the tech giants (Swift, C#/.NET etc.) continues to lap open source equivalents

Ignoring for the moment that both of those are open-source, I've used both of them for several years on major projects, and I'm not sure I see this "power and elegance" you refer to.

Did you mean to say "old concepts dressed in the newer fashion, and backwards compatibility"?

Re: Being Slow to Criticise

#60

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

taffer wrote: post #54
grey-area wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe he shows in that book it's not a very good approximation - the market oscillates from overshooting to undershooting actual returns, and I don't think he believes market movements are always based on rational decisions, hence the title of the book.

> I believe he shows in that book it's not a very good approximation But what does that mean? What is a good predictor of future returns and what is not? If markets are not, what is? > the market wildly overshoots and undershoots actual returns Well, the actual returns are only known retrospectively, but the current prices have to reflect all future returns. So, of course, current prices will always be wrong, that's…

You seem to be saying that current prices are always wrong, but less wrong than estimates of future prices based on current prices.

I have to admit to being surprised by this line of argument.

Post reply on HN